Thursday 9 April 2009

Pro-lifers must defend the Pope from the Blairs' campaign

On 5 March, I blogged about how Tony & Cherie Blair had launched high profile attacks on two fundamental aspects of papal teaching on building a culture of life. Just over a month later, the Blairs have made a similar attack on Pope Benedict on the same issues. Tony Blair, in an interview with Attitude, a homosexual magazine, has said that the Catholic Church must change its "entrenched attitudes" to homosexuality. And Cherie has told the Times of Malta that she was "rather saddened" by the Pope's comments in Africa that the promotion of condom use threatened to worsen the spread of HIV.

What this repeat joint attack suggests is that the Blairs are using their continuous high-profile media exposure to undermine the Catholic faith to which they subscribe. In his Attitude interview, Tony said: "For all religions, the challenge is how do you extract the essential values of the faith from a vast accumulation of doctrine and practice?" Considering the support that both Tony & Cherie have given to pro-abortion campaigns, will the Blairs now soon be campaigning openly for the Catholic Church to ditch its teaching against abortion?

A clue to the answer to that question can be found if we ask another question a la Cicero: Cui bono? Who benefits from the Blairs' campaign against Catholic teaching? The answer is clearly the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and other abortion promoters, which are endorsed by Cherie Blair, and the pro-abortion groups with which Tony Blair and his Faith Foundation have established such close links, continuing the pro-abortion policies he pursued as an MP and as Prime Minister. The culture which has resulted from a rejection of traditional sexual ethics has in turn created a culture of death. As I've mentioned before, it is IPPF which has led the attacks on the Pope -whose comments on condoms and AIDS is bad for their "big business".

For the sake of unborn babies, women and young people, pro-lifers of all faiths and none must rally together to defend the Pope, from the Blairs' campaign. As the late Pope John Paul II taught in Evangelium Vitae (para. 97), it is an illusion to think that we can build a true culture of human life if we do not offer adolescents and young adults an authentic education in sexuality, and in love, and the whole of life according to their true meaning and in their close interconnection.